STONY ISLAND (AFTER THE GREAT BLIZZARD)

Stony Island (After the Great Blizzard), 40 x 50 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark SOLD

Back in March I blogged about the exhibition I did at the Art Rental and Sales Gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago.  To recap, I had won a major prize and corporate purchase award in the 1978 Artists of Chicago and Vicinity show at the Art Institute.  When I told Esther Sparks, the curator of that show, that I was one of the many Chicago artists whose work was shown at the Art Rental and Sales Gallery in the museum's basement, she told me that she was the curatorial advisor to the Women's Board that ran that gallery.  She said they were planning to start a series of exhibitions each featuring the work of a sculptor and a painter (or other two-dimensional artist) and asked if I would like to have my work featured in one of those shows.  Would I ever!  She wanted to feature my large landscapes, and gave me some time to work on the project, which was fortunate, because right then the only large landscape I had had just been purchased by the international accounting firm now known as KPGM for its corporate offices.

At the time, I was more comfortable working in oil paint and pencil or colored pencil on paper than I was working on canvas or other supports, so that was my medium of choice.  The best really large heavy weight archival paper I could find was a hand-made Japanese printmaking paper called toyoshi that came in deckle-edged sheets about 42 x 72 inches.  It had a smooth absorbent surface that was perfect for printmaking, but it wasn't sized, so that liquid paint or ink would bleed when applied to its surface, and that surface was a little soft to draw on with pencils or other dry pigments.  I would have to size the paper to make it suitable to paint on.

You can size paper with egg whites or gelatin, but I decided clear acrylic medium was a better choice for my purposes.  Through a series of experiments I devised a formula of water and Liquitex matte medium and acrylic paint (for color) to prepare the paper.  Actually I created two formulas-- one stained the paper a paper-bag tan that was ideal for figures and some landscapes, and the other stained the paper a sort of pearly grey with hints of blues and violets that was perfect for other landscapes, like Stony Island.  Both formulas included either Liquitex iridescent bronze or iridescent pewter paints which contain mica flakes that give the paper's surface a slight luster.  I got the idea of using mica flakes from Japanese woodcut printers who sometimes add it to their inks.  I hung the paper vertically and applied the sizing liberally with a wide brush.  On the absorbent surface the color bleeds to an even tone without streaks or blotches that when dry is no longer absorbent and much better to draw and paint on.  On Stony Island you can see a bit of the toned paper color in the area between the white snow and the dark grey street pavement.

Stony Island is one of six large landscapes I painted in 1978-9.  My subjects ranged from rural scenes in down-state Illinois and Indiana to urban images of Chicago and the lakefront in Waukegan.  I originally went to the South Side to research a painting of the El (elevated railway) station where a line terminated at 63rd and Cottage Grove.  It was after the Great Blizzard of January 1979.  Front-end loaders and other earth-moving equipment had been used to clear enormous amounts of snow from the city streets.  Some snow was dumped into the lake, but a lot was dumped by the truck-full onto any vacant land in the city.  I got fascinated by the acres of snow mountains and wound up painting Stony Island not so much as a specific place but as an overview of the crazy snowscape left in the wake of that winter storm.  The details are accurate, however.  That's what busses looked like, that's how people dressed, that's the celebrity columnist whose picture was on the newspaper delivery trucks, and the stairs to the El station appear in the upper right corner of the painting.

None of my large landscapes sold at the Art Rental and Sales Gallery show, although several smaller paintings did.  

In those days the Art Institute used to support Chicago art by staging a big juried Artists of Chicago and Vicinity exhibition every second year.  I got another call from Esther Sparks who told me the museum had decided for 1980 that instead of an open juried show they would do two smaller invitational shows called Chicago and Vicinity Prizewinners Revisited, Parts 1 and 2, each on display for several months.  Part 1 would feature abstract work.  I would be in the representational Part 2.  Esther came to my studio and selected Stony Island for the exhibition.  It was originally scheduled to be up for three months, but the museum later asked if they could have it for a few more months so they wouldn't have to rehang their Borg-Warner Gallery, and it wound up being on display in that world-class art museum for seven or eight months altogether.

Since then all of those big oil and pencil on paper landscapes have been sold to various private and corporate collections.  Stony Island has been in many exhibitions, most recently in "Places: From Arcadia to Urban Landscape" at Murphy Hill Gallery in 2009, in my one-person exhibition at the John H. Vanderpohl Art Museum in Chicago in 2010 and in "STRAIGHT UP CHICAGO: ART WITH A TWIST," the details of which are posted above.        

  

       

MATHON'S PARKING LOT-- A PAINTING FOR MY EXHIBITION AT THE ART RENTAL AND SALES GALLERY OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

Mathon's Parking Lot, 70 x 40 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark
Collection of the Sandoz/Novarty Corporation of Switzerland

In the previous post I described what happened at the opening reception for the Art Institute of Chicago's 77th Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity: Works on Paper.  When my wife Pat and I left that event we were ecstatic and very hungry.  We decided to celebrate by having supper at one of our then-favorite restaurants, Mathon's in Waukegan.  Mathon specialized in seafood, and I believe he was the only Chicago-area restauranteur who still had a commercial fishing license for Lake Michigan.  We drove up Lake Shore Drive and Sheridan Road to Waukegan, arriving late but still in time to enjoy an excellent meal.  We were among the last diners to leave, and when we went out to the empty parking lot I was struck by the visual quality of the way a giant cement elevator across the street on the waterfront loomed over us against the night sky.  I thought the scene might make a good large-scale painting, and I went back a couple of weeks later on a Sunday afternoon and shot reference photos in daylight.  I used the photos to get the details right, but I painted the scene as it had looked at night.  I imagined myself 50 feet up in the air so that I was looking down at the herringbone pattern of the parking lot, but up at the cement elevator.  

Mathon's Parking Lot was one of six new large landscapes I painted for the Art Rental and Sales Gallery exhibition that featured my work and that of sculptor Joe Burlini, although only five of them made it into the show because I sold one of them out of my studio as I described in the previous post.  The gallery borrowed Indiana Cropduster from its new owner to fill out the exhibition, and we also showed some of my smaller landscapes and some of the on-site watercolors from my Traveler's Sketchbook series.  None of my really big paintings sold at the exhibition, but several of the smaller ones did.  The previous show in the same space had featured the work of one of my teachers at the School of the Art Institute, and I was pleased to note that my work outsold his both in quantity and dollar value (a petty observation, I know).

Mathon's Parking Lot was in a number of other exhibitions, and it won a prize at one of the Baer Competition exhibitions at Beverly Art Center.  About ten years after I painted it, Sandoz Crop Protection Corporation, the American subsidiary of Switzerland's chemical giant Sandoz, built a new corporate headquarters in DesPlaines, Illinois, and were looking for art with an agricultural theme.  An agent showed them my work and they purchased two paintings, including Mathon's Parking Lot. Years later Sandoz, now called Sandoz/Novarty, relocated its American operation back to Europe.  I've been told the art collection is now in Denmark.

      

INDIANA CROPDUSTER

Indiana Cropduster, 70 x 77 inch oil and pencil on paper painting by George C. Clark
SOLD to KPMG Corporate Collection, Chicago

I don't usually consider Indiana Cropduster to be part of my "Traveler's Sketchbook" series, but since I did travel to research its subject, I'll tell how I came to paint it here.

In 1976 and 1977 I was working a lot in the medium of oil and pencil on paper, both for my figures and landscapes.  Mostly I was working on 23 x 29 inch sheets of Strathmore kid finish bristol drawing paper.  I had been showing and selling landscapes at the Art Rental and Sales Gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1974.  Usually the gallery didn't want to jury art bigger than 60 inches, but this time they announced a special jurying for wall-hung pieces that were at least 5 x 4 feet, preferably larger.  It seems that one of the city's private social clubs was redecorating their space in a Loop building, and they wanted to buy some big new art.  The gallery gave its artists plenty of warning about this special jurying and I accepted the challenge.

I decided to paint a subject I knew well, the Indiana countryside where my wife Pat's relatives had a big farming operation near Lafayette.  I had painted some of my first landscapes there, as I recounted at the beginning of this blog.  The next time we went there I brought my camera and sketchbook and worked out the composition of this painting.  I decided that what is most characteristic of that part of Indiana is how flat it is and how it has all been gridded up by roads and railroads and almost completely covered by plantings of corn and sometimes soybeans.  I thought of two ways to depict it.  A very wide skinny painting could emphasize the land's flatness, but it wouldn't show the gridding.  I decided instead to use a device I'd seen in the work of two of my favorite painters, Gustav Klimt and Paul Hogarth.  I would keep the horizon very high and look down on the land as if I was 50 feet up in a cropdusting airplane.  The painting would be true and would convey more information than any photograph I could take at ground level.  The old Farm Co-op grain elevator stood along the Monon Railroad track just outside the tiny town of Ockley, about a three-quarter mile walk from the home of Pat's aunt and uncle.  The pick-up truck belonged to Pat's cousin.

The biggest heavy archival paper I could find was handmade Japanese toyoshi paper that came in deckle edged sheets about 42 x 72 inches.  I sliced the deckle off a long side of two sheets and spliced them together using one of the cut off pieces glued across the seam on the paper's back side to secure them.  I then taped my giant sheet to the wall of my studio, a storefront I was sharing with three other artists, and started painting.  

It took me about 3 weeks to finish the painting, although I wasn't working all day everyday on it since I was also working with life models sometimes in the same space.  The hardest part was painting literally thousands of cornstalks leaf by leaf starting at the bottom until they feathered out about two thirds of the way up the painting.  It was worth doing though, because it gave the painting an obsessive quality and was the best way to describe the sheer volume of corn I wanted to depict.

Work presented for this special jurying didn't have to be framed.  I trimmed the painting to 70 x 77 inches and tipped it onto a backing I constructed by overlapping two layers of 40 x 60 inch quarter- inch foamcore sheets that was a few inches larger all around than the painting.  I then wrapped the whole thing in clear acetate for protection, having spliced the acetate with clear tape to get it big enough.

My friend Marilyn Packer knew several artists who were submitting work and she arranged to borrow a bakery truck to deliver the art on a rainy Saturday.  Unfortunately, the back door of the truck was smaller than we expected, and Marilyn's canvas wouldn't fit through it, although the other art did.  She wound up tying her painting to the back of the truck with rope, and I drove right behind the truck with my flashers going because her painting covered the truck's tail lights.  Her painting was a little wet from drizzle by the time we got to the Art Institute loading dock, but it was an oil painting and proved to be undamaged once she dried it off.  We all waited longer than usual for the jury results, and when they came we were all informed that the club had changed its mind and purchased nothing, and all the art would have to be picked up.  The Art Institute was as bummed as the artists were.  I got Indiana Cropduster back and hung it on the wall of my studio.

Flash forward several months, maybe a year...

The Art Institute announced that its big semi-annual juried show, the 77th Artists of Chicago and Vicinity Exhibition, will be limited to "Works On Paper" in 1978.  Is this fortuitous or what?  I now needed to frame Indiana Cropduster, and because I knew any professional framer would charge a fortune to do anything that big, I decided to do it myself.  I constructed a stretcher frame an inch larger all around than the painting out of 1 x 6 inch redwood planks.  Then I stretched linen canvas around the redwood and secured it on the back with staples.  I sized the front of the canvas with clear acrylic medium to make the canvas shrink and tauten, and also to glue the fabric to the redwood where they are in contact.  I used nails and glue to fasten lengths of three-quarter inch square wood molding all around the perimeter of the top surface of the stretched canvas.  The visible surfaces of the molding and the adjacent inch of canvas were painted matte black.  Narrow strips of archival acid-free museum board that would be concealed by the painting were tipped around the outer edges of the canvas, and finally the painting was carefully tipped onto the outer edges of the museum board strips with water-soluble glue.  (The purpose of the museum board strips is to enable the painting to be removed from the frame if ever necessary by popping the strips free of the stretcher without putting undo stress on the paper of the painting.)

I wanted to photograph the painting, but there was no way I could get enough even light on a surface that big to do it inside the studio, so we carried it outside and leaned it against the wall of our storefront.  Pat held it to keep the wind from knocking it over while I stepped back into Sheffield Avenue between passing traffic to shoot 35mm slides of it, which is what you see posted above.

I bought a giant sheet of plexiglas to lay across the black molding risers that would keep it from touching the painting's surface.  I had to fabricate my frame stock out of base molding and big quarter-rounds which I stained and varnished myself because I needed it to have a much wider than normal lip that would cover the molding risers you see around the painting in the photograph.  I paid a framer to cut my frame stock to size on their mitre-saw.  I assembled the four frame segments with glue and small nails, and when we lowered the frame over the plexiglas and stretcher, miraculously, everything fit perfectly.  It had taken several days' hard work, but I had kept my out-of-pocket framing expenses to a minimum.  I paid a "Man with a Van" who  advertised in the local underground newspaper $25 to drive me and the painting to the warehouse downtown where the jurying would take place.  I think I'll save what happened next for another post.